The notation for the limit above is read as "The limit of as approaches is ." Imagine we have a function such as . When , is undefined, because . Therefore, on the Cartesian coordinate system, the function would have a vertical asymptote at . In limit notation, this would be written as:

For the function , we can get as close to in the -values as we want, so long as we don't make equal to . For instance, we could make x=.00000001 or -.00000001, but never 0. Therefore, we can get as close as we want to , but without reaching it. The Left limit is any value that approaches the limit from numbers less than the number, and the Right limit is any value that approaches the limit from number greater than the limit number. For instance, in the function , since the limit for is 0, if , it approaches the limit from the right. If we instead choose -1, we say it approaches the limit from the left.